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Lesson from an Apple.

I took an apple to work today for my mid-morning snack. I wanted that apple. The bright shiny red skin, plump white flesh, sweet juice and satisfying crunch. Oh, that apple was perfect!!! It sat on my desk through the morning giving hope to my short morning break. It was a respite from the hunger that usually comes at this time. But today, this day, I had the most refreshing, delicious, natural repast! It was a force of will to not bite into that succulent, soft flesh. Oh! How a vampire must feel!!!

Well, my patience paid off, for the time came to feast!!! I picked up the fruit of my eye with its gleaming skin. I smelled it: wonderful! I rubbed it off with some paper towels. I admired it. This will be wonderful! My mouth was watering in anticipation! The time came and I bit! Oh! What…wait…this isnt’…but…why…it was…was rotten! The melodrama was over. I spit out the putrid bite and threw the apple in the trash.

Blah! It was over. But what was really over? See, the apple never changed. It was rotten from my refrigerator to my desk. It was rotting while I argued about deviation reports and batch records. Reality is that some apples are rotten and some are ripe, and some are not ripe. What changed was my thoughts about the apple. Even after finding the rotten flesh, the skin still gleamed, the smell, still sweet. It was still an apple.

Was anything out of sort? No, the only disappointment was that my story of the apple was not real. The apple was reality, my thoughts about the apple were delusion.

How often in life do we create stories about food, situations and people? What happens when those stories, those lies, turn out false? My experience is that we blame the external…the person, place or thing. Nothing changed, it was as exactly as it was meant to be…it just didn’t line up with our expectation. So, we abandon it and treat it harshly. “You aren’t what I thought you should be…you don’t deserve my love!” How arrogant of us!!! Are our ideas so perfect that everything else is bad? Does the universe not know better than we?

Maybe it is time to accept that some apples are rotten, that some people are not what they seem, that some parties just aren’t that good. But, while seeing reality as it is, maybe we should also be willing to love it none the less. In the end, by not loving it, we only rob ourselves of an experience, friendship, or other nourishment. Anyway, when we really begin to see reality, we will see that everything is exactly as it should be.